


Opus 6/7 (Rabid Possum Requiem)

by rokhal



Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [8]
Category: Critters (Movies), Ghost Rider (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Animal Attack, Animal Death, Cars, Curses, Drunkenness, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Monsters, Poisoning, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27197032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: A cursed music tape makes Robbie and Eli get along.It also lures aggressive wild animals into the Hell-Charger.
Series: The Legend of Hillrock Heights [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1176620
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Opus 6/7 (Rabid Possum Requiem)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was greatly improved by Tumblr user and Ghost Rider fan @Mnemosyne2110, without whom nobody at Canelo's Auto and Body would be speaking Spanish.
> 
> The critters here...well, they're not exactly Critters-critters, but they actually totally are. This is a direct rip-off of Critters (1986).

Ten pm on a Tuesday, and Robbie was in Pasadena ubering “Marlin, 4.6 stars” from a hipster-bar-slash-magic-shop to a run-down salt-box house half-swallowed in vines and tropical trees. Los Lobos played from his phone through the cassette-tape adapter to the radio: a compromise between Eli's preferred drug cartel corridos, nostalgic ranchera, and eighties synth-pop; and Robbie's punk rock, reggaeton, and electro-noise. Neither of them actually liked Los Lobos, but they didn't hate it either. Though that could change; the night was still young.

“So sorry I can't afford to tip,” the pax said, tilting his head so the charm on his nosering bumped his lip and his dandery dreadlocks swung against his crisp new Experimental Audio Research t-shirt.

Eli exploded inside Robbie's head. **Fuckin' told you he's bad news, borin' holes in our head with his eyes all the way from Hollywood, fuckin' cultist-looking cyka-mudak. Don't you dare let him out, Robbie. Floor it! All the way across the state line! Let's grind his brains into the sand and turn his fake-magic tattoos into a floormat!**

Robbie twitched his jaw. “For your next ride. Make sure you have enough for a tip. It's polite.”

“On the other hand,” the man said, widening his eyes as though working through some profound insight—one eye green and one brown, just slightly less freakish than Robbie's—“I have something you could appreciate. Music. For your journey.” He reached into the canvas draw-string bag at his feet and shuffled around, clinking and clacking. At last he pulled out a clear plastic case, about two inches by three inches and half an inch thick, that contained a white plastic cartridge with two little wheels in the center. There was no label, just the number “6/7” in Sharpie.

“What kind is it,” Robbie said. He collected CDs and bootlegs whenever he saw punks and MCs selling them on the street corners; he didn't have time to go to concerts anymore, but local music hit his sweet spot better than commercial bands. More raw. More honest.

“Oh, it's very special,” the pax said, holding the tape cassette up to the light of the streetlamp shining through the windscreen. “It's played on a theremin. Very unique instrument, it's played by disrupting the electromagnetic fields it projects into the air. I'm giving it to you, because,” he nodded at the tape deck in the Charger's after-market radio, “you have the ability to use it, and also because...I think this tape belongs with someone like you.”

Robbie felt his heart clench, and his fists throttled the steering wheel. “What do you mean?”

The pax leaned away from him sharply. “Oh, nothing. Just. You have the aura of a man who...appreciates music.”

 _ **Stay the fuck away from our aura,**_ they thought. “Don't look at my aura.”

“Loud and clear,” said the pax. He waved the cassette across the center console, crossing into Robbie's driver's seat, and Robbie snatched it out of his hand. The pax jerked his own hand back as though he'd been burned.

“Thanks,” Robbie said, slow. Maybe the guy was just weird. He might have autism or something, trouble with norms and social cues; maybe he meant well. “Really. I'll, um, I'll listen to it. Just, remember to bring some money to tip, okay? Lots of drivers are struggling to get by. It makes a difference.” He opened the clear case and started to feed the tape into the cassette deck.

“Oh, no,” the pax said, holding up his palms. “You listen to this when you're alone. This is for just you. Special.”

 _**Ooookay.** _ They waited for the pax to get out of the car, watched him hoist his bag to his shoulder and slam their door. Robbie picked up his phone and looked at the Uber app, prompting him to rate the passenger.

 **Zero,** Eli suggested, as usual.

Robbie squinted out the window at the pax, wondering if he was just clueless, or if he was a self-promoting cheapskate foisting his ambient noise experiments on anyone who held still long enough, deluding himself into believing his big career break would come through random happenstance. Robbie split the difference and gave him three stars.

He put the Charger back in gear and left the curb, set off to find a convenient parking lot to nap in and wait for Uber to ping him again. He glanced down at the tape deck, the edge of the little white cassette sticking out of its mouth. He'd never played an actual tape in the tape deck before, but he knew it worked: the adapter he plugged his phone into used a dummy cassette. He pushed it in, felt motors and hooks and little felt pads spring to life inside the sound system and draw out a loop of tape. The music was very soft; he turned the volume up.

He heard whistling. High, clear, careless, and liquid, a gentle coo that warbled up and down like ocean waves, or a mother's breath. Robbie waited for a tune to emerge, or a beat to drop, or a human voice to join in, but they passed six blocks and parked in front of a Rite-Aid, and the music carried on, aimless and sweet over the soft hiss of static from the tape.

**This is kinda good.**

Robbie found himself nodding.

He shut down the Charger's engine, but left the radio on, eased back in his seat, watched electric flowers bloom behind the backs of his closed eyelids. Eli fell silent. Robbie stretched his feet out next to the pedals, folded his hands in his lap. Tension unspooled from his neck and jaw and the cramped muscle between his eyebrows. Goosebumps rose over his body. The theremin whistled on.

_Oh. Oh, I know, this is the thing that makes the flying saucer music. From those cheesy old movies._

**What?** He felt Eli shifting in his head, almost like pacing. **Huh, you're _right._ Weird. I never thought it could sound so... **

_Cool?_

**Transcendent.**

A harsh beeping broke through the music, and Robbie jerked upright, clenching his teeth. Another ping, a pick-up three blocks north. He stabbed the accept button, shook his head, put his hand on the keys to start the engine.

The radio kept up its soft, fluting cascade of gliding tones. Robbie turned the volume up and headed off to pick up the next pax.

* * *

Christy, 3.7 stars, sneered down at his radio as they got moving. She'd brought along one other woman in her twenties or thirties and a man with a soul patch, and those two were currently making out on Robbie's back bench seat. “What _is_ this?” she demanded.

“It's a theremin,” Robbie informed her.

“It's horrible. Put on some Coldplay or something.”

 _You can't just **demand different music** _ **in my fucking car. Robbie, drive off a cliff, we can turn the horny couple into charcoal and cut this bitch's face off and make it look like an accident.**

“No,” Robbie snarled.

“Ex- _cuse_ me?”

He tilted his head and stared at her, half his mind in the car, keeping it straight. He could see the pulse in her throat jumping. “I don't have Coldplay,” he gritted out, ejecting the tape that read _6/7_. “Would you prefer some early Metallica?”

“Christ,” the woman spat.

“Don't know that band.” Robbie put on a top-40 station. It was currently advertising a mattress sale. The couple in the back seat grunted, and someone kicked the Charger's driver's seat, getting Robbie in the kidneys and denting the leather.

_I'm gonna one-star these people. And then I'm gonna catch one last trip, hopefully on my way home. And then I'm gonna sleep._

**And we'll listen to more of that tape.**

The smacking noises from the back and the petulant stare from the passenger seat faded away, and Robbie relaxed his grip on the wheel until his tendons stopped straining under his gloves. Home. That nice music. _Yeah._

* * *

Night on Hollywood Boulevard, and the air was cool and perfumed with jasmine as he cruised the Charger under the sparkling streetlamps, liquid music rippling from the radio. “Ninja Wolf wants chocolate,” Gabe said from the front seat, and, yes, they were getting ice cream. On the back bench sat Ninja Wolf, all seven feet of wolf hair and muscle and shining teeth, tapping his claws on the hilts of his katanas. In the trunk, a prostitute kicked her heels futilely against steel plating. This was a good night, ice cream and murder and music...

He felt a pain, somewhere in the car. The prostitute—did she have a fucking angle grinder back there? Or Ninja Wolf, it must be his claws on the upholstery. He spun around in his seat, what was he _**doing**_ to the car—

The car hurt. Movement in the car, something was _inside,_ tearing up the car, not a human, something small, heavy, strong. His whole being shuddered in revulsion. Robbie sat up in bed with a gasp of horror, sweat breaking out all over his body. He smelled gasoline. The car needed him, something was attacking it, chewing on his body.

The engine turned over. His lungs heated, engine fumes burned through his throat, charred his tongue, the transformation grabbing at him too suddenly to resist, and _oh fuck, point of no return. It's a work night, why now?_ He surrendered to the flames and melted through his bed, congealed into the Rider as he dropped down through the roof of the car, ablaze and revving furiously on the curb in front of the apartment.

The Rider knelt on the back bench, peered at the floor, and shrieked down at a hole in the floor he could stick his leg through. The carpet looked chewed, the edges of the exposed steel were jagged. The hole sealed itself in a wink of molten metal, but the Rider's rage remained. He poured himself through the passenger seat to the front of the cabin, ducked his blazing head into the footwells looking for more injuries.

Something lunged out from under the driver's seat at him, a hairy varmint with a compact muscular frame. Double rows of teeth as wide as its entire body latched eagerly into his shoulder, tearing through his leather skin and into the fire beneath. Its powerful jaws crushed the Rider's collarbone. He grabbed it by the hair, snarling, as it let go with a squeal and pawed at its mouth with stubby forearms. Spikes on its back jabbed through the Rider's palm, releasing more fire against its skin.

The Rider leaned his tattered shoulder through his driver's seat, pulled it out sealed in fresh leather. He cranked his arm experimentally, stared at the screaming ball of hair and teeth in his hand. Part of him enjoyed the pained shrieking and the smell of burned hair, and part of him was nauseated and wished he could have caught it without hurting it in the first place. He split the difference, called a two-edged knife out of the steel of the door, and stabbed the animal between the eyes. It jerked in his hand at each twist of the knife. The shrieking stopped. Dark liquid oozed out onto the blade and out the creature's back end, soiling the carpet. The Rider lurched out the door, holding the dense body at arm's length, and threw it to the ground. He urged the car's flames hotter, burning up any hair or blood or feces from the carpets and sealing up any damage he'd missed, and then he and the car snuffed out.

Robbie stood under the streetlight beside the Charger in his socks and boxers, and stared at the bleeding carcass. It smelled odd, a little like fish and a little like fireworks. He bent over it, ready to jump clear if it moved again. He saw pale spines peeking through the coarse fur on its back, the spikes that had punctured the Rider's palm. Its rear feet were hairless and wrinkled, almost like human feet, but with three triangular toes, and they seemed to join directly onto its back on either side of its stumpy tail. He took off one sock, put his hand in it like a glove, and carefully rolled the animal over.

On its underside, the fur was shorter and softer, like a cat. Its front legs weren't quite as stubby as the back legs—they actually stuck out from its body—but they ended in the same soft three-toed paws. Its staring dead eyes were huge and red, and its jaws looked like they'd come from a shark.

Robbie had never seen anything like it before, but that didn't mean much. Maybe it was sick, or mutated, or some pet or zoo animal that had gotten loose. Maybe a Tasmanian Devil.

**Nasty little bugger. Hey, get the pliers out of the trunk, I wanna see how it chewed through an eighth-inch of steel.**

Robbie, unlike Eli, did not have a horrible serial-killer tooth-pulling fetish. The dead animal was disgusting, and those spines on its back looked dangerously sharp, so Robbie picked it up by one leg with his socked hand and carried it over the asphalt to the dumpster behind the apartment complex, then trudged back to the front door and patted his boxers down for his keys.

He realized he'd just locked himself out of the apartment.

**Pull me some teeth and I'll fire you back up and port you inside.**

Robbie stared down at the doorknob and debated the merits of meditating himself into a blind rage in the middle of a work night so he could burn up on his own, versus sleeping in the car or fishing the carcass out of the dumpster. If he slept outside, Gabe would wonder where he was. He had to make Gabe's breakfast. _How about one of those spikes on its back?_

**How about ten.**

_Five._

**Cut the bullshit, this ain't a fishmarket. All of them.**

_Whatever._

* * *

Seven-fifteen next morning, mouth dry and head pounding after burning up twice in twenty minutes last night, Robbie dished up a pile of what was supposed to be migas on his and Gabe's plates. He didn't know how to make the tortilla chunks crispy, which was just as well, because Gabe had trouble with crunchy food that he couldn't pick out ahead of time, so it was pretty much egg-and-cornflour mush. Robbie forced it down, tried not to think about where the eggs had come from.

He noticed Gabe poking at it with his fork. “You feeling okay, bud?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said, slowly. “It's not making me hungry.”

“How's your tummy?”

“It's my _stomach._ I'm not a baby.” Gabe glared at him and kept pushing his food around the plate.

**You forgot salt.**

_Shit._

**That's what your cooking tastes like.**

“Sorry, bud, I forgot salt, that's why it doesn't taste good.” He grabbed the canister off the counter, poured a bit into his palm, and mixed it in with Gabe's breakfast, took an experimental bite. Tasted a lot more like egg now. The tomatoes seemed brighter. He passed Gabe his plate back.

“Do yours, too,” Gabe advised. “Mm. Salt!”

“Good idea.” Robbie salted his own migas, realized halfway through that what he really needed for breakfast was a quart of Gatorade. He filled a tall glass with lukewarm water from the tap and chugged it at the sink. Just a few more minutes and the school bus would arrive, and then Robbie would head off to work, and on the way to Canelo's, he could listen to the theremin tape. His headache eased and he smiled at the thought.

* * *

Robbie was bent almost upside-down in the passenger-footwell of an '04 DeVille, unclipping endless electrical cables from the gutted center console while trying and failing to hum the seductive, wandering tones of _6/7_ that still danced through his brain, when he felt something tickling the underside of the Charger.

He froze, shut his eyes, and cast his thoughts out of Canelo's Auto and Body and into his own car, parked in the sun out in the fenced lot. The cinderblock wall and the cars on either side of it blocked most of his vision, but when he concentrated on the steel undercarriage and the faint vibrations humming through the tires, he thought—he swore—something was moving. An animal. Something _touched_ him, curled up and rested its small soft body against the shady side of the Charger's back tire. He felt a sound echo inside the rubber, a grunt or a chirp. Something else touched him under the hood, crawled up onto the steering linkage and squeezed between his wheel well and his radiator. Another small body followed it, and then a third on the other side. Robbie shuddered, grabbed at his head, almost stabbed himself in the eye with the plastic pick in his hand.

**Fuckin' cats.**

Robbie thought of the strange, toothy little animal they'd killed last night.

 **You kidding me? What are the odds.** Eli sparked up the car, his ghostly version of an anti-theft device, and Robbie felt the animals, whatever they were, jolt away from the hot metal and tumble out of the engine compartment.

_Don't burn the cats!_

**I hate cats. They should know better than to crawl in our car.**

He kept working on the Cadillac, unclipping and unscrewing and setting aside the approximately 347 fragile molded plastic shapes that made up the dashboard and approximately 102 individual wires and electrical components that made up the instrument cluster and audio and climate control systems which all had to be removed in order to replace the air conditioning condenser, even as he struggled to resist the urge to run outside and scrub out his engine compartment with a soapy rag. He could do that on his lunch break.

For lunch, he'd brought a mix of last night's spaghetti and this morning's left-over migas, piled together in an old sour cream tub. After microwaving it, he headed out to the car with a cloth and brush and a spray-bottle of engine degreaser, planning to listen to the tape some more while he ate and scrub out the feeling of cats or rodents crawling around inside his body. The Charger's black paint seemed to shimmer in the brutal noon-day sun. Robbie reached out for the chromed handle; he was so tired, and inside the car was warmth and security and comfort and haunting theremin music that would make his headache and his baffled rage at the engineers who'd designed the Cadillac's climate control system all fade into honeyed ecstasy...

Something grabbed him by the ankle and yanked. His lunch and his cleaning tools bounced off the hood of Marty Ochoa's Integra behind him, the back of his head bounced off the Integra's door, lightening-pain shot up his leg as something crunched, dragged him half-under the Charger. He gasped, too shocked to yell, and braced his arms on the Charger's running-boards, and then red eyes and coarse gray-brown fur lunged out from underneath and crushed his elbow with shark-teeth, shook its muscular neck, tore his grip free, and dragged him into the dark.

Round hairy bodies swarmed over him under the Charger. They bit him and tore into his legs and shoulders, worse than bullets, filling the air with blood. He and Eli finally mustered some outrage in all their shock, and the tearing and crunching and jerking of being mauled to death vanished under the familiar agony of burning alive. Pained squeals filled the air, but not from him.

The Rider sank through the car's shadow and manifested out from the bottom of its undercarriage, just two arms and a face and a spike-ended body-hammer. He saw smoking fur and squealing toothy mouths, lashed out with the hammer, grabbed the animals two at a time and melted them up through the metal and into the trunk. At least one of them scurried away before he could grab it. He had to hunt down any escapees; whatever these things were, they were dangerous.

He remembered that these critters could chew through metal. He extruded his head and torso out of the lining of the trunk, saw a mass of hairy bodies cringing away from the fires of his skull and trying to gnaw through his left tail light. He grabbed them and knocked them in the head one by one, which got difficult as they broke from their dog-pile and started springing and rolling around the cramped space, trying to get away. He realized that he felt sorry for the animals. He didn't want them to eat his coworkers, or kids, or people's pets, or anyone else in East Los, but he wished he had a better solution than “hit them with a hammer until they stop trying to bite him.”

He had to be almost entirely Robbie right now.

“ _Why the fuck are these things here?_ ” the Rider hissed, poking the animals one by one with the head of his hammer to make sure they weren't moving.

**Good question. You killed these pretty good, port them away and snuff out so we can listen to that tape.**

The tape was exactly what he wanted, but escaping into the music had to wait. _Port them where?_

**Away. Far away. Hell.**

The Rider dissolved into the metal of the car, out of the trunk so they could tear open a hot black rift out of the bottom to...somewhere, and let the trunk's entire contents drop through it. Carcasses gone, they regenerated the floor of the trunk with fresh, clean carpet.

Something cold blasted through the Charger's radiator, swept up over the hood to hit the blower. They turned their attention out and forward. Ramón Cordova and Marty stood in front of the Charger, fire extinguishers in hand, while from back in the shop, Tommy and Lenny and Jose watched from the open bay door and Canelo stood by with his phone to his ear. In Robbie's panicked transformation and the Rider's haste to catch all the animals from under the Charger, he'd forgotten to tamp down the visible flames from the car, and now everyone at Canelo's thought the Charger had a fuel leak. He closed the blower's intake valves so nobody got the bright idea to shoot his heart full of CO2 and ABC-powder, and slowed his engine and pulled his fires deep inside his steel. The Charger's frame felt crammed to bursting, two souls and the Rider's body and the furious energy of their flames.

_Can—can we turn the engine off with me in here? I mean, with my body inside the metal?_

**Sure,** Eli said with disturbing equanimity. **But you're not getting out until we start back up.**

 _I gotta stop them from calling the Fire Department and getting us towed. And one of those little monsters got away._ Robbie struggled to think. _They're distracted. Port me somewhere away from the car._

**I hate getting towed. Fuck. Pick somewhere close, it's broad daylight.**

_Near the gate, the shadow under the Silverado._

**On three.**

**One, two...**

_**Three.** _

They reached away from the car, felt blindly around for a shadow to haul themselves out from. The sun was bright, bouncing up from the asphalt and scattering down off cars and walls and signs, contaminating the cool darkness under the cars. They ripped a hole out from under a Silverado parked just inside the gate, and the Rider punched his way up and kicked free and flopped onto the concrete. Another cold jet of extinguisher spray hit the Charger, _stop, it's fine,_ **bastards are trying to kill us,** and he panted out a last jet of fire and snuffed out.

Snuffing out so suddenly, without the catharsis of a good fight or especially after a setback of any kind, was always a recipe for problems. Robbie counted himself lucky he'd changed back with his work clothes. He rolled away from the hot impression of the Rider's body on the concrete, and the movement made his stomach churn. He swallowed hard as he forced himself to his knees, then staggered out from between the customers' cars and over to the Charger. “Stop,” he coughed at Marty and Ramón, whose fire extinguishers still aimed at the Charger's grille and blower. He ignored their incredulous stares as he lurched to the Charger and collapsed on its hot hood, hands outstretched to ward them off. “Stop. It's fine. It...it does that.”

“Chico,” Ramón started, brow furrowing as he struggled to choose which of a dozen valid responses to give to Robbie's absurd statement, but Robbie interrupted him when he lost his battle with nausea, bent double, and coughed a puddle of fluorescent green fluid onto the concrete. “Mierda!” Ramón yelled. “Somebody drive this cabron al hospital!”

Robbie scraped his tongue over his teeth and spat out a foul mix of stomach acid and sickly sweetness. “I'm fine.” He popped the Charger's hood with his mind and reached underneath to unlatch it.

Marty grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him away before he could prop it up. “Robbie, hazte pa’tras!!”

He flexed the spring of the hood's hinge and raised it, revealing the engine bay dusted with extinguisher powder. “See,” he said, waving as Marty grabbed him around the waist. “Fire's out. It's fine.”

“Keep him away,” Ramón ordered, and stomped up to the Charger, clutching his fire extinguisher like a shotgun. “Fire's out.” He scowled. “Even the tires. None of this looks scorched.” He backed away, but kept the nozzle aimed at the engine.

“There was this animal,” Robbie said, “under the car. Tried to bite me. It got away.”

“¡Callate!,” Ramón snapped. He whirled on Marty and Robbie, bent down, stared into Robbie's eyes, and sniffed. “Reyes,” he growled. “Tell me what you drank.”

A response bubbled up out of Eli's muscle memory. “I don't drink—”

Ramón slapped him. They bared Robbie's teeth. Ramón ignored them, jerked his finger at the puddle of vomit in front of the Charger. “No mames, muchacho. Nobody's dying while I'm here. Dime que chingados te tomaste.”

What _was_ that bright green liquid pooling on the concrete? Robbie licked his lips again, stared down at the slime, and the answer hit him with another twist of nausea. That was coolant from the Charger. Motor oil was gross, but coolant was toxic as hell. Ramón must think he'd tried to kill himself. And now he had to go puke some more in private, bring up the rest of it before he got poisoned. **Lie.** _I know. Uhh...what's green and weird-looking._ **Mountain Dew.** _Weirder._ “Energy drink,” he tried. “Think I'm allergic. There's this animal, tried to bite me, got away, it's really aggressive, I think it mighta run behind the garage.”

Ramón stared down at him for a long tense moment. “If you're lying, I got vatos down below que te van a poner una putiza por ser tan pendejo.”

Robbie shook his head. “Hay un animal, we gotta check the shop. Es peligroso.”

“Que, un coyote?” Marty asked.

“No.” Robbie pictured the broad-headed, stub-legged balls of teeth and muscle and hair. “Rabid possum? ¿Un tlacuache?”

“I don't need this,” Ramón grunted. “Marty, you and Reyes push this heap out away from the other vehicles in case it explodes. Yo agarro a tu pinche tlacuache.”

“It's fast,” Robbie yelled after Ramón as he stalked around the corner of the garage where they kept the rubbish and scrap metal. “Ten cuidado.”

Ramón waved his hand dismissively.

Robbie watched him disappear. He should be there. Ramón was huge, but he was only human.

“No voy a discutir con ese tipo,” Marty said with a shrug. “There's a bit of a slope down the middle of the lot; if I put it in Neutral, we should just be able to roll it.”

“I got it,” Robbie said, blocking Marty from the driver's side door. He pushed in the clutch and flicked the shifter out of gear. “It's fine. Really. Fire's out.”

“If you'd been inside, esterías muerto, guëy,” Marty admonished him. “That's not fine. You and me, we're going over this thing bumper to bumper before you drive out of here.”

**Meddling bastard. Tell him to go sit on a dick.**

“It's fine.” Robbie had to grab onto the Charger's hot roof to haul himself up and out. He shook his head and staggered. “Okay, let's push.”

“Stay in there and steer,” Marty told him.

“It tracks straight. It's fine.” He joined Marty at the back bumper and pushed, at the same time pulling with his thoughts at the wheels and trying to get them to rotate on their own. Marty braced his legs apart and shoved, and together they rolled it forward, slowly, until it hit the slope and drifted away toward the center of the lot.

“¡Puta madre!” Marty yelped, slipping on the pool of blood where the Charger had been parked, and, oh right, Robbie had been mauled half to death under there two minutes ago. The Charger rolled away, passed the storm-drain in the middle of the parking lot, and looked ready to roll right into the shop. Robbie stretched his mind into it and clenched the brakes.

“I told you,” Robbie said, wobbling where he stood.

**Robbie. Keep your feet on the ground. What are you doing.**

_I feel really weird._ He waved his hand in front of his own face, just to prove that it was still him driving his body, and his movements felt a split second delayed. _I'm me—I've gotta be me—_

**Are you—did you get us _drunk?_ **

_**I** didn't do anything! Am I drunk? _

**Gotta be the antifreeze. You need to vomit. Right now.**

Robbie blinked down at the mess of blood and tufts of hair under his feet, said, “Ew,” folded at the waist, and stuck his fingers down his throat. It didn't work at first, just made him gag, so he shoved his hand in deeper, lost his balance, fell in his own blood, and finally puked up more coolant.

Gunshots rang out from behind the garage and Robbie lurched to his feet, reached backward with a bloody hand for Marty. He heard squealing, heard Ramón cursing. Another gunshot, then slow footsteps. Ramón emerged from behind the corner, no gun in sight, dangling a hairy round creature by one stumpy leg in his corded fist. The whole crew stared as he crossed the parking lot and dropped the animal in the dumpster by the gate. He turned toward Robbie and Marty and spotted the blood. “¡Carajo! ¿Ahora que?”

“¡No sé!” Marty yelled. “¡Movimos el coche y esto estaba ahi abajo!”

“Maybe they were fighting,” Robbie grunted. He felt sick and useless. Maybe he should burn up again, start over with a fresh body. He'd probably have to, no matter what; if he was already feeling it, the antifreeze must be in his blood.

“Energy drink?” Ramón demanded, hauling Robbie upright by one arm. “¿Es neta?”

Robbie nodded, scraped antifreeze off his tongue with his teeth. **Damn, you make this look difficult.** “I must be really allergic.”

Ramón's eyes darted up and down, and his stony mouth thinned. “I know you have family. You want to leave your brother alone like this?”

“ _No,_ ” Robbie snarled. He grabbed Ramón's forearm, shook it, an aborted movement somewhere between slapping his grip away and hauling him in for a hug. “Never, never.” Softer, he muttered, “Wouldn't work like that, anyway.”

* * *

After awkward explanations and a heated argument between Ramón and Canelo—if Reyes won't admit he tried to kill himself we can't force him to go to the hospital, was Canelo's take—Robbie spent the rest of the work day sitting around. Sitting in front of the toilet trying to vomit, sitting in the locker room waiting for the floor to stop spinning, sitting beside the gutted Cadillac to supervise Lenny putting it back together, while alternating sips from a fifth of vodka Ramón had scared up from somewhere and an extra-large Powerade from the Burger King across the street.

Robbie looked up from his phone where he'd been surreptitiously researching antifreeze poisoning just in time to see Lenny try to snap the top of the dashboard back in without plugging in the instrument console first. “Suka-blyat! You think the customer can drive this bitch by ear?” someone snarled with Robbie's mouth. He flailed with his arms and clanked the vodka bottle against the vertical beam of the lift nearby. “Sorry. Sorry. Len. The. The thing, with the round circles. You plug it. You plug in the instrument console. Then the dash.” He slumped over his knees, stared at the lines of fluid in the bottle and the drink cup. _**I hate this.**_

There was a trash can over by the back corner. Maybe he could throw out the rest of the vodka and Ramón wouldn't notice—if he could stand up first.

His legs slipped from under him. Fuck.

* * *

Nobody found the reason the Charger had caught fire. Nobody found any sign it had been on fire in the first place. Everyone should have gone home by now, but with Robbie's...sudden illness, and having to redistribute his workload, and then having to check over the Charger, everyone had stayed late. It was seven in the evening, and Ramón and Marty were two of the last three left. “I _told_ you sukas,” the thing that was failing to be Robbie snarled, gesturing with the dregs of the vodka bottle. “S'fine. It _does_ that. S'my car. Stop touching me, stop touching my car!”

“Calmate,” Marty said, patting the air near Robbie's shoulder. “Nobody's touching you.”

“I _hate_ this,” the Robbie-thing moaned. “I don't drink! Ramón, you cocksucker, this is on you! I'll cut your dick off and choke you with it! I done it before!”

“Ookay, vamanos de aqui.” Marty heaved him up with one arm over his shoulders and poured Robbie's vodka-soaked body into the Acura's passenger seat. “Direct me.”

“This ain't my car,” it muttered, knocking its head against the window. “I want my car.”

“No voy a manejar tu coche,” Marty said. “Tengo que ir al super despues de esto.”

“You even _think_ of driving my car and I'll carve both your eyes out,” the vodka snarled. Its gaze landed on the radio, then it cranked its head around against the glass and stared longingly at the Charger. “My music.”

“I gotcha,” Marty said, starting the Acura. Reggaeton played on the radio.

“Noooo,” the vodka moaned. “The, the. The other music.”

“I'm not going through your phone.”

“No, it's in my radio, it's a white tape thing, it's special—”

“Drink your anti-suicide juice,” Marty sighed, and steered his Acura out onto Hillrock Lane. “North or South Ruckleroad?”

“South,” said the vodka. “I hate this. I'm not me. I'm not anyone.”

“That sucks,” Marty said. “Pero se va a poner mejor. Eventualmente. And you've got people who care about you, you know? Tienes que hablar con alguien.”

The vodka lowered its head between its knees and tried to fling its consciousness down through the pavement and up into the Charger. It didn't work, just made Robbie's body black out briefly.

“Me dices si te vas a guacarear.”

The vodka really wanted to puke. But if it puked on Marty's carpet, Marty would be angry. He'd tell the other guys at work that Robbie had puked in his car, try to humiliate him. Robbie could never earn back that kind of social capital. The only solution was to kill him now, and then puke in his car.

The vodka unbuckled its seatbelt and tried to bail out of the Acura.

Marty yelped and grabbed Robbie's sleeve, pulled over to the curb while the vodka struggled to get loose, collapsed halfway out of the car, and heaved up bile. “¡Mierda! ¡Sientate carajo!”

“I'm not safe,” the vodka moaned.

“No, because you won't stay adentro del puto coche.” Marty maneuvered all the way to the shoulder, buckled him back up, got out, and raced around to fiddle with the open passenger door. “Come on, come on—child locks. ¿Ves lo que hiciste? You made me put on the child locks.”

They made it to Robbie's apartment building. Marty helped the vodka to the door, watched it fumble Robbie's keys out of its pants, eventually unlocked the apartment door for it.

“Robbie?” Gabe asked from the kitchen.

The vodka had a shock of guilt. The bus must have dropped Gabe off without waiting to see if anyone was home to meet him. Gabe knew he could call the Valenzuelas whenever he needed help—what had he had for dinner?

“Robbie, is that you?” Gabe wheeled out. He had a ziploc tub on his lap, the spaghetti from the fridge, probably eating it cold.

“No! I don't know,” the vodka said. “I'm. I'm gonna sleep. Marty, you gotta help my brother, okay, this is a favor. This means something. I'll do anything. Anyone you want. The mayor, anyone.”

“Vete. A. La cama,” Marty said, leading him down the hall. “Baño, Gabe's Room, okay, este debe ser tuyo. Buenas noches.”

“Night,” the vodka grunted. The last thing it knew was Marty moving Robbie's limbs to prop him into the recovery position.

* * *

Morning came with no sudden involuntary transformations into the Rider. Blocks away, the Charger remained unmolested. Robbie woke to a text from Marty on his dying phone.

_You alive?_

_Outside in 10_

Robbie lurched off the bed and crumpled to the floor, clutching his skull. It felt like his brain had shrunk overnight and was tearing free from its blood vessels under its own weight.

 **That was interesting,** Eli boomed. **So close...yet, so far.**

_Thanks to you, they all think I fantasize about murder all day. Fuck you._

**Hey! Not my fault. That was why I don't drink. People don't like me when I drink.**

_I wonder why._

**In vino veritas, they always say. Which is _bullshit._ Everyone else is fake all the time, drunk or sober. It's just me who's real, and the fakers can't handle it! **

“Gabe, you okay?” Robbie croaked, trying to change out of last night's boxers without making his clothes drag on his skin. “I'm back. I'm so sorry. I got—something happened at work—”

“Robbie?” Gabe grunted. It sounded like he was out in the hall. Robbie finished pulling on his pants and threw on a fresh Skeptical Youth t-shirt. “If you're not Robbie—I'm not letting you out!”

“I am,” Robbie said, trying to convince himself as well as Gabe. He dragged his hands through his hair. He was so thirsty he felt like he'd just snuffed out from being the Rider, and he also really needed to pee. “It's me, Gabe. It's Robbie. What should I do?”

Gabe cracked the door open. “Hand.”

Robbie offered his hand through the crack, but Gabe didn't take it. He kept waiting, waiting and waiting for Gabe to accept it, to realize he could be trusted right now, and the minutes dragged on, and Marty texted him again but he couldn't read it, because if he took his hand out from the crack in the door Gabe would know he'd stopped trying—

At last Gabe backed his power chair away from where it was blocking Robbie's door. And Marty showed up to take Robbie to work, and give Gabe an Egg McMuffin.

* * *

By the time Robbie and Marty arrived at the shop, Robbie still felt drunk. Ramón ambushed him at the door and pushed a bottle of malt liquor into his hands, but this time Robbie managed to escape to the bathroom and switch it for tap water. Canelo called him into the office halfway through a brake service on a Jeep Cherokee, and told him to sit down in front of the desk.

Robbie kept his shoulders straight and his eyes focused on his boss's forehead. “Mr. Canelo, I want to apologize for my behavior yesterday,” he croaked. “For insulting Lenny and threatening Mr. Cordova. That's not how I—I don't have an excuse. My words I use with my coworkers are my responsibility and I'm sincerely sorry.”

“Don't apologize, that was the only part of yesterday's shit-show that was in any way funny,” Canelo said. “I'm talking about what led up to that.”

“Something about the car is attracting those animals. Maybe I ran over something dead and didn't notice. I'll try to figure it out, clean it off.”

“Not that. Side note, you're way too relaxed about your car catching on fire. I've _assumed_ you thoroughly inspect our customers' cars for basic safety issues—”

“I do. Always.”

“I'm talking about whatever you drank. Whether it was some energy drink full of fluorescent dye, or _whatever_ that was.” Canelo sighed and leaned his elbows on the desk. “Reyes. Your parents, they were good people. What happened to them was a tragedy and anyone who knew them wants you to rise out of that and get on with your life. Meanwhile, I've got to run a business. I need all my hands on deck, on schedule, turning wrenches. If you want to hurt yourself, I have to ask you, as someone who knew your father, to... _not_ do that, and as a businessman, to not do it when you're scheduled to be working.”

“You knew my dad?” Robbie asked, desperate for information as well as a change of subject.

“A little. He was with the power company. He drove this bucket-truck with alignment issues. Good guy.” Robbie waited for more, but Canelo seemed to be done.

**You want stories? I got stories.**

_Keep them._

“So,” Canelo said, standing and looking away, “Go on. This is strike one. Notice how Lenny's still here after he OD'd last fall? Same with you. Two strikes, I start looking for a replacement.”

Robbie nodded. He had to change back from the Rider more carefully, even when he was exhausted or in a hurry or when he wasn't entirely in control. And stop those biting animals from following him. “I understand.”

At the end of the day, they got to re-unite with the Charger. Robbie vacuumed and scrubbed the engine compartment, unbolted the air intake, tapped extinguisher powder out of the air filter, taped a trash bag over the hole in the hood, and gave it a quick wash. With the car clean, and with the promise to himself of a real waxing and buffing on Sunday, he slipped into his sun-warmed cabin, shut himself inside his steel, turned on the radio, and played _6/7_. Side A ran out, and Eli prompted him to eject the tape and flip it upside down to play Side B.

Side B was just what they'd hoped: more of the same blending wandering tones that twisted through their souls, harmonized with the Charger's rumble, soothed their hangover, eased the claustrophobia of sharing Robbie's brain, and gilded Hillrock Heights's struggling storefronts and graffiti-marred murals as they cruised along. Their mutual hatred gave way to shared rapture.

 _**I could listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life,** _ they thought.

They arrived at the middle school, pulled up to the curb to wait for the kids to get out, shut the engine down and left the radio on. Robbie still felt hungover, his back hurt high under his ribs, and he was both starving and nauseated, but the music pushed all that discomfort from his mind. The minutes until school let out passed in a haze, and Robbie watched the horde of children pour out the double doors until Gabe appeared in his power-chair.

**Stay. Gabe can come down the ramp to us.**

_No,_ Robbie thought, and slowly, effortfully, turned the key and shut the engine and the radio down.

**Just wait! Listen to the music! You want to! You know you want to, I can feel it! Turn it back on!**

_I don't do a lot of things I want to do._ Robbie stood up and out of the car, rested his hands on the roof for a moment. With the music gone, he felt like roadkill. He struggled to recall what he'd researched yesterday in his drunken stupor: something about a chemical reaction, something about kidneys, something about the real damage showing up days afterward. Ramón's alcohol trick apparently hadn't spared him all the effects of the antifreeze. The nausea and back pain felt like a typical post-ghost hangover, but worse. Maybe he'd been poisoning himself once or twice a month all along, mixing himself up with the car whenever he changed back to human too fast.

He'd deal with it later.

 **You can't live your whole life saving up for the future,** Eli argued, still hung up on the music.

Robbie ignored him, made his way up the stairs, and waited by the ramp, his hands visible and empty at his sides.

“Hi, Robbie,” Gabe said, and Robbie melted with relief.

On the ride home, he put on the tape again. “What's this?” Gabe asked, staring at the radio.

“It's experimental,” Robbie said. “Somebody wanted to make a new kind of music and that's what they came up with.”

“It's weird.” Gabe reached out and stroked the tape deck.

Robbie grinned at him. “You like it?”

Gabe stared out the window, swaying to the wandering melody. “I don't know.”

* * *

When they got home, Robbie got out some chicken to thaw and then crashed on the couch while Gabe started his homework.

**You want to go sleep in the car and play the tape.**

Robbie knew that him hogging the couch was a big reason that Gabe still sat at the table working on his literature essay instead of playing MarioKart right now. He shut his eyes and fell asleep to the sound of Gabe's pencil scratching at the paper.

“Robbie,” Gabe woke him, standing with his crutches from several feet away. “It's eight o'clock. Are you hungry? It's eight o'clock.”

 _Fuck._ Robbie lurched upright, clutched his head. Eight at night, and they should have eaten already. Robbie should be heading out to drive Uber. “Sorry, I didn't mean to sleep so long. Thanks for waking me up.” The rice took almost half an hour, and he had to cook the chicken and onions, and then it had to cool a little, and something about “letting the flavors meld.” He shook his head gently and steeled himself. Food. Cook. Yes.

That night, Robbie managed to cook onions without burning them, a culinary milestone. It smelled almost like the arroz con pollo Gabe's friend's mom had shared with him months ago, wholesome and homey, and Robbie could only hope he'd feel well enough to enjoy it tomorrow. He picked at his food, dished Gabe a bigger bowl, hoped he'd keep his own portion down. He was just starting to wash up, when he felt something tickling the underside of the Charger.

He froze, rag and saucepan in his hands.

Out in the parking lot, the Charger was surrounded by concrete walls and other cars; Robbie couldn't see much from it. But he could feel the tires resonate with chirping noises, feel hair brush against the metal. When something hopped up to perch on its driveshaft and started gnawing on its undercarriage, right between the mounting rails of its driver's seat, he felt that, too.

The critters were back. And they were trying to get into the car.

Ramón wasn't around to hunt those things down with the gun he wasn't legally allowed to have; it was entirely up to Robbie to round up all these horrible animals before anyone in the apartment or surrounding homes got hurt or killed—Robbie, or the Rider. The steel gave way with a tear and a wrench, and furry bodies chewed and squirmed their way up through the floor carpet, piling into the footwell. Robbie burned with the urge to transform right there in front of Gabe and make the invasion stop.

He took a deep breath and slowly set the pot back in the sink and rinsed his hands.

This was the third time in two days that these animals had attacked the car. He had to figure out what was attracting them, and where they were coming from. _Any ideas?_

 **I woulda noticed if we had peanut butter stuck to our undercarriage,** Eli said. **They're not possums. They're not raccoons. I'd say chupacabras, but that's just 'cause nobody knows what those look like. Weirdest thing about them, aside from the jaw strength, is when you kill them, they don't smell like blood. They smell like saltpeter. Brimstone. That, and fish.**

 _Think they're demons?_ Robbie shook his head violently as one of the animals ripped into the upholstery of the driver's seat. _I imagined demons a lot bigger. And smarter._

**Hell's a place, it's got to have wildlife. But let's table that idea, they don't act magical. Maybe they're a lab accident, or aliens. Question two: how do they keep finding us, and why.**

_If they wanted me, they could chew through the wall or attack me at work,_ Robbie reasoned.

**Of course they want us, they're just being strategic. They hide in or under the car, and wait for us to get close. Like a car bomb.**

_So they want me, but they're following something in the car. Like a pet tracker or a cell phone._

**Lots of chances for malicious parties to plant trackers in our car,** Eli mused. **Any one-star pax stand out to you?**

Robbie gnawed on the inside of his cheek. He hated to say it, but... _Tape Guy._

**That's ridiculous!**

_Maybe he put a homing device inside the tape. We don't have to get rid of it, we just have to take it apart—very carefully—and pull the homing device out! The timing makes sense!_

**No, it does not!** In the car, something pawed at the underside of the glovebox, as though feeling for the latch. **We've had the tape for almost three days, and those things only showed up the three times! The parking lot, Canelo's, the parking lot again! It was at Canelo's all night last night, and they never showed. The only way that makes sense is if they're attracted to the music!**

Robbie's head shot up as they both had a horrible realization.

 _Maybe it's a homing device that only has power while the tape is playing,_ Robbie suggested hopefully.

 **We got to figure out where these things are coming from, or we'll never listen to the music in peace,** Eli resolved. Out in the parking lot, the engine started up. **Get out there, let's play Pied Piper.**

“Gabe, I'm going outside to check on the car.”

On the couch, Gabe mashed buttons on his controller and focused on the TV screen. “Okay, Robbie.”

“I might be a while. You okay to brush your teeth and go to bed at ten o'clock?”

Gabe looked up, and Robbie heard his MarioKart crash. “You're coming back?”

“I'm coming back,” Robbie promised. “You want me to wake you up when I get home?”

“Yes, please.”

“Don't go outside. Call if you need anything, and don't open the door.”

Gabe nodded and watched as Robbie put on his jacket and headed out.

He stopped at the entrance to the parking lot, heard the Charger's rumble and the chirping, chittering sounds of the unidentifiable animals around and beneath and inside it. The urge to become the Rider burned. He kept his distance and thought his way into the car, the gearbox, the parking brake. He put it in first and rolled it slowly out through the parking lot, watching its path through the car's sight and his own.

As it crept out to the street, he saw two small shaggy masses keeping pace with the Charger's back bumper. Robbie froze, watched them follow the car. One of them paused and looked at him. He saw its eyes flash red from the porch light behind him.

He concentrated on the radio and made it swallow the cassette tape, rolled down a window while he was at it. _6/7_ lapped lovingly at his human ears. The animal's blocky head snapped away from him, and it hurried after the Charger as it cruised along Ruckleroad Lane. It caught up to the car at the turn onto Hickory Street, and they felt it scramble up inside through the hole in the floor, join its packmates in shredding the upholstery.

 _Later,_ Robbie told himself. Through the car, he could still hear _6/7_ 's sublime melody cooing from the radio; he focused on it, hummed along, and this soothed his pain and horror and revulsion as the little hairy animals ravaged the Charger's interior. He pulled out his phone, stepped warily into the parking lot, crouched down, and shone its flashlight under the other cars, watching for red eyes or moving shaggy bodies. None remained. In the Charger's empty parking space, he saw damp, three-toed tracks.

**Must've come over the lawn next door.**

Robbie kept half his mind in the car, let Eli drive his body and follow the tracks around the wall of the parking lot and past the irrigated lawn belonging to the duplex beside their apartment block. He let the Charger come to rest on the curb by a vacant house owned by the city, two blocks down the road. Let the hairy animals run and tear and chirp at each-other and listen to the beautiful tape...

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something rolling quickly down the road. At first he thought it was a hubcap—about the same size, rolling about as straight—but it didn't rattle, and instead of flat, it was nearly spherical, and hairy. He watched it roll down Ruckleroad Lane and turn on Hickory, never slowing or wobbling.

_Maybe they're hedgehogs._

**Wow. Okay, first? Real hedgehogs aren't blue. Second—**

_I think it came out of that storm drain._ Robbie jogged across Ruckleroad to where he'd first seen the animal, bent low, and listened. He heard chittering, scrambling. He backed away up the sidewalk and watched another hairy little animal squirm its way out, turn a somersault, and roll down the road toward the Charger.

**Ignore it. Keep going and find the lab that cooked these things up!**

He continued up Ruckleroad, pausing his humming now and then to listen at each storm drain. He thought he'd lost the animals a block up the road, but then he caught a flash of red eyeshine from behind a grate on a side street. The homes got closer together, the drains less frequent. As he got closer to the freeway, it got harder to hear.

Inside the car, heavy little bodies packed shoulder to shoulder on the seats, swaying and humming to the music, while more heavy little bodies gnawed on the steering wheel and shifter. The seatbelts were confetti. It would heal, Robbie knew. Just like his kidneys. It would heal in a burst of cleansing fire, but not until after he'd found the source of the animals—their nest, or their cages, or their mothership, or their hell-portal. He would find it, and destroy it, and then he could listen to _6/7_ as often as he wanted. And then they'd find Tape Guy and beat an explanation out of him.

The street took a sharp turn beside the freeway, and here it had no streetlamps at all. Just the freeway lights, a hundred feet away and across an eight foot concrete wall. Robbie jogged along the sidewalk beside the wall, watching for storm drains, watching for moving shapes in the shadows of the houses opposite him. The road took a gentle upward slope and turned into an overpass. There had been no drain grates for the past half mile.

Robbie stopped at the railing overlooking the freeway. He could cross the freeway, but the animals were following the drainage system. Did the drains continue under the freeway? Is that how they were built? Which had come first, the freeway or the neighborhood? The freeway was so huge and deep, and routing something like a drain system or a sewer underneath it seemed like a maintenance nightmare, but what did Robbie know? He wasn't a city planner. But if he'd designed the drain system, he'd run it parallel to the freeway. It certainly wouldn't run over the bridge.

He turned around, back down the dark street and long empty sidewalk. Maybe the storm drain continued under the houses where the street had turned, and popped again the next block over.

He'd just started jogging back when the animals in the car crunched through and destroyed something new, something sensitive. The pain staggered him, and worse, _6/7_ went silent.

**Fuck!**

_The radio, they broke the radio—_

**The tape is _in_ the radio!**

_Maybe just the speakers—_

**I can't feel the tape. Can you feel the tape?**

Robbie catapulted his mind into the car, leaving his body spacing out on the sidewalk. The interior was a sea of agitated hairy bodies and ancient fiberfill. He couldn't move the radio dial. He couldn't feel the tape player at all. He heard plastic crunching.

_**NOOOOO!!!** _

They lost control of themselves entirely and the car exploded in flames. Blocks away, Robbie's body spontaneously combusted and sank into its own shadow, to emerge as the Rider from within the ceiling of the burning car, jaws agape, shrieking their fury, lashing out at the pack of trapped hairy animals with fists and knives and teeth. The car shook with the roars of its engine and the impacts of the Rider and the animals flinging themselves between the roof and floorboards and unyielding windows and locked doors. The hole in the floor sealed shut, the steel heated, the ruined upholstery burned away, and the springs and frames of the front seats crumpled in the heat, leaving nowhere for the animals to hide. At last, sick with fury and loss, they let the charred bodies drop through the floor onto the pavement, let the interior renew itself, and snuffed out.

Robbie found himself sprawled sideways on the back bench seat. He leaned down hurriedly to check the floor, and saw something that didn't belong: a crumpled brown string, or, no— **Fuck,** _ **fuck—**_ a crushed and chewed ribbon of brown plastic. He spooled the ribbon up with shaking hands, followed it under the front seat and beside the center console, crawled between the seats to feel around on the passenger-side footwell, and found tooth-marked shards of white plastic, _6/_ barely legible on one of the fragments. The endless ribbon of tape was a chewed and snarled birds' nest.

 **No, no,** Eli said frantically. **We can fix this. We just need some Scotch tape, a pencil, and steady hands!**

Robbie put the cabin light on and combed through the ribbon tenderly, smoothing it between his fingers. It was stretched and creased. He found one break. Two breaks. More. _6/7_ was in at least four different pieces, but more importantly, the ribbon itself was distorted. _Eli. I don't think we can._

 **No, no—** Eli pushed at Robbie's hands from within, and in the privacy of the car, Robbie stepped back and let him try to untangle the music. His hands shook just as badly under Eli's control. He watched Eli trace curves of ribbon in and out of the knot the creatures had managed to make of it, watched him hold lengths of it up to the light to gauge the width of the holes and dents, and felt a rare stab of compassion for his uncle, desperate and unable to accept this loss.

 _It's gone,_ Robbie reminded him after Eli's fourth attempt to re-order the shredded fragments of ribbon by laying them out on the dashboard. _6/7_ was lost forever, just like all of Robbie's Hot Wheels from before Mom and Dad had disappeared, just like Gabe's stuffed donkey from their third foster house, just like Mom and Dad. _You tried. It's too damaged._

 **The fuck it is!** Eli snarled, and he smashed Robbie's fist into the radio, cutting Robbie's knuckles and breaking the tape deck again.

Robbie firmed his will and shoved Eli away from his body. _You're done._

Eli cursed him all the way home and all through the night as he tried to sleep.

* * *

The next day at work, Robbie felt dead on his feet and faintly nauseated from sleep deprivation, and he had to slip off to the lockers to chug a Rockstar twice before noon. Ramón caught him the second time, and knocked the half-empty can out of Robbie's hand.

“I'm not allergic to this one,” Robbie said lamely. Ramón grunted and stalked away.

The morning passed in a slog of fluid changes and brake services and one diagnostic for a Buick Century with an abrupt loss of power and a sinking rear end, which had Robbie very excited for a good puzzle and a lengthy repair until it turned out that the cause of these problems was that the customer had loaded ten bags of quick cement powder in the trunk and forgotten about them.

Lunch break came, and he wanted to relax in the car and listen to _6/7,_ but _6/7_ was gone forever. He stared at his cracked tape deck and ate the last of the leftover spaghetti without tasting it.

 _Maybe Tape Guy made more,_ Robbie suggested. _We'll check online._

Eli snorted. **More cursed tapes? I'd say around six more.**

 _Cursed?_ Robbie set his fork back down into his margarine tub.

 **Yeah,** Eli replied, as though it were obvious, which, in retrospect, it was. **The fact that we both liked it should have been a clue.**

“Why didn't you _say_ something?” Robbie snarled.

 **Because I liked it,** Eli said.

_Unbelievable._

**Not everyone's a masochist. Hey, you're right, let's look online and see if he put more tapes on, on, what is it, Napster.**

_We should._ The prospect of hearing something like _6/7_ again washed away Robbie's fatigue. _We should check the news and see if more of those animals are out there._

**Good idea. Can't have innocents getting mauled to death, listening to cursed music. We should find the rest of the tapes, and confiscate them.**

_...Yes. And then we'll..._ Robbie trailed off, felt something in him rebelling against what he was about to say, something in himself and not Eli.

**Don't say it!**

_We'll destroy them._

**No!**

_But we'll still look for more music,_ Robbie continued. _Maybe I just like theremins._

**We'll see.**

* * *

Though they spent two hours online—two hours of sleep debt Robbie wouldn't pay back until Sunday—they never did find opuses _1/7_ through _7/7._ Non-cursed theremin music was disappointing: either a poor imitation of a violin, or just weird for the sake of weird. They did find a shy-looking musician from Austria named Dorit Chrysler who leaned in to its organic, eerie qualities to produce a total of five moody electro-pop songs—a far cry from the solid hour of ecstasy that _6/7_ had brought. Which, now that Robbie thought about it, had been creepy and unnatural.

They also found six newspaper reports of people who'd been mauled to death by wild animals in LA and San Diego, stretched out over the past three years. Four men and three women, from all walks of life: an elementary-school teacher, a chef, a police officer, a registered sex offender on parole—no obvious commonalities. The latest death had happened last night, in a Pomona suburb. The victim was named Marlin Brady, 43 years old, no dependents. An experimental musician with an interest in the occult. Tape Guy.

**Damn. He had a promising career.**

_I guess when we killed too many of those animals, the survivors turned on him._ Robbie closed his laptop, stretched, and flopped into bed. If they'd been mauled to death like the others, the papers would have called Robbie and Eli an ordinary mechanic. Tape Guy had to have known what he was doing; maybe he'd given out the tapes at random, just trying to stave off his own demise, or maybe he'd chosen his targets deliberately, trying to make the best of a bad situation by dealing death to the deserving.

_He really did read my aura._

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry, Robbie's going to be blasting Rage Against The Machine in bumper-to-bumper traffic again by the end of the week.
> 
> Thanks again to @Mnemosyne2110, who graciously provided all Spanish dialogue! Here is what everyone said:
> 
> Marty grabbed Robbie by the shoulder. “Robbie, hazte pa’tras!” Get back!  
> "Callate!" Ramon snapped. Shut up!  
> "No mames, muchacho. Dime que chingados te tomaste." Don't bullshit me, boy. Tell me what the fuck you drank.  
> "I got vatos down below que te van a poner una putiza por ser tan pendejo." I got homies down below who'll give you a motherfucking beating for being such a dumbass.  
> "Hay un animal. Es peligroso." There's an animal. It's dangerous.  
> "Yo agarro a tu pinche tlacuache." I'll get your fucking possum. (Tlacuache is the Nahuatl word for opossom, and is more commonly used than the Spanish word in Mexico and former Mexican territories. Thanks, Mnemosyne!)  
> "No voy a discutir con ese tipo." I'm not arguing with that dude.  
> “No se!” Marty yelled. “Movimos el coche y esto estaba ahi abajo!” I don't know! We moved the car and this was under there!  
> "Energy drink? Es neta?" For real?  
> "No voy a manejar tu coche,” Marty said. “Tengo que ir al super despues de esto." I'm not driving your car; I gotta go to the grocery store after this.  
> "Me dices si te vas a guacarear." Tell me if you're going to puke.  
> "Sientate carajo!" Sit down, dammit! "Stay adentro del puta coche." Stay in the fucking car. "Ves que lo me hiciste?" You see what you made me do?  
> "Vete. A. La cama. Baño, cuarto de Gabe, okay, este debe ser tuyo. Buenas noches.” Go. To bed. Bathroom, Gabe's room, okay, this must be you. Good night.
> 
> Marty's such a good friend. Too bad Robbie hasn't noticed.


End file.
